Sunday, February 28, 2010

I admit this cartoon is a little opaque. I got a few emails wondering what it meant, which was not a surprise. I was thinking that the dog sees Rorschach images and interprets them as messes on the floor, to which he replies, "Bad dog." The man rewards the dog for his performance.

One odd thing I only just noticed while posting this is that in the fourth panel, there is a comma behind the "Bad dog," instead of a period. This was a mistake on my part and I'm surprised my editors didn't catch it and ask me about it. Or maybe they fixed it in the version that went to papers and forgot to tell me. Or maybe they were drunk and thought they'd told me. Or maybe they did tell me and I was drunk. Life presents so many possibilities.

If any of you had a different interpretation of this gag when you first saw it, let me know. I enjoy hearing about the way reader's minds work.

P.S. I drink, but I never get drunk. At least not on purpose. I have no idea how often my editors get drunk.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Last weekend I was in Florida for three days doing a talk, visiting with family, and sitting outside without a shirt. The next day I was looking out the window of my apartment here in Brooklyn at great wads of snow falling from the sky. Three days later and it is still snowing. The forecast has it continuing for a few more days yet.

It seems surreal to go from a sunny, warm climate to a snowy one in a single day, because it is. We only recently gained the ability to do this, so it is only natural that it seems unnatural. A few times in my life I have traveled to the other side of the globe and the feeling when I returned was very strange. My mind resists fully grasping the concept that yesterday afternoon I was in Bangkok, now I'm in Texas. It's enough to whiplash the sense right out of you.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

This was a spirited contest this week, lots of entries and a good time was had by all. Our winners this week are as follows:Grand Prize!!!!...Megan2nd Prize!!!...Spyra3rd Prize!!...Marcello

Both our second and third place winners are previous winners, but I think Megan is new. Many congrats to the winners and everyone who played. If you want to see the winning answers as Megan submitted it, click here.

If you'd like to see the answers graphically displayed in high-tech, click here.

Tune in tomorrow and every day for more monkey shines, and next Thursday for another contest!

FIRST PERSON TO SOLVE THE PUZZLE BELOW AND POST THE ANSWERS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION WINS! HURRY!

RULES, ETC:As usual, two images are posted below, one is the original cartoon, the warped image beneath it has been changed in 15 ways. Your mission, if you are the disco royalty that I think you are, is to find those differences.

1. There are 15 differences between the two cartoons.2.NONE of the differences have to do with the warped nature of the second image.3.ALL of the differences are something missing, added, or moved, not just "bent" from the distortion. The differences will not be too subtle, so once you spot one you should be relatively certain you've found it. (As opposed to something like, "Is the hat on this one is a shade lighter than the other one? Hmmm.")4.FIRST PERSON to correctly list the 15 differencesin the comments section of the post wins 4 packs of Bizarro Trading Cards, mailed by me personally from Bizarro International Headquartersin Brooklyn. I'll even lick the stamp, unless it's self adhesive. SECOND AND THIRD persons with correct answers will each get 2 packs of Bizarro Trading Cards!5.Put your email address on your comment so I can contact you if you win. I won't post it or keep it or file it or sell it or mount a Broadway musical about it.6. If you live outside the U.S., I may not be able to send you a prize. Depends. Canada is probably fine, Saudia Arabia, probably not.

My good friend,Cliff, came up with this idea. I don't know why. Cliff spends most of his time in a teepee outside of Dickshooter, Idaho, and occasionally an idea for a cartoon will pop into his head and he'll mail it to me on a postcard.

Later today will be another cartoon contest. I'll post it at 7pm Eastern Time. I hope you will play.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

I haven't much to say about this GPS cartoon other than I hope everyone understood it. The idea was that the GPS led them to a cliff above their destination, then instructed them to drive off the edge. It seemed funny when I thought of it, but I'm not sure about the final result. I like GPSs but I don't like the voice. I prefer to just use the map part, like the one on my phone, and find my own way. I don't trust the robot voice to always know the best way.

At long last I am back in front of my computer where I belong. I went to Florida this past weekend with CHNW. I was hired to do a speech for a humanist group down there, the Center For Inquiry folks, and had a great time. Good people, smart questions, laughed a lot, took me to lunch after. What's not to like?After the talk on Saturday, CHNW, her dad and I drove to an interesting little place called Ybor City where we hit some shops and had a beer. In old timey times there was a big cigar factory there where hundreds of people hand-rolled cigars all day. The tradition continues as there are cigar shops all over the place and a few people sitting in storefront windows rolling away. If you're into cigars, this is a real treat.

This pic at left was taken with my iPhone and I think it turned out pretty swell.

Even if you're not into cigars, it is strange to see so many smoke-friendly establishments withinthe borders of our law-infested land. Smoking is so uniformly despised in the U.S., even outdoors, that walking down 7th Street in Ybor City feels more like Cuba than Florida. I often get chastised by friends and fans for smoking cigars, but I try to be considerate. I usually smoke at home and never smoke around crowds of any kind unless I'm walking quickly. I figure if my passing by with a cigar is enough to set someone off, they need more help than anti-smoking laws can give them.

Lots of things annoy me momentarily in public – bad music, mullets, cologne, confederate flags, cigarettes(they smell very different from cigars because they are crap tobacco and full of chemicals), people wearing fur, the smell of someone's fastfood, people who talk too loud on cell phones, defenders of Dick Cheney, the way everyone but me drives – but I just figure that's the price of leaving my house.

I cannot imagine a society in which we legislate against everything that briefly annoys someone. This encyclopedia of signs at a playground in Sarasota springs to mind. Looks like fun, doesn't it?

Friday, February 19, 2010

It used to be that when I would see an old man dressed particularly badly I would wonder if I would one day be that man. Now I think it is more likely that he never cared about the way he looked in the first place, or just has lousy taste. People don't change all that much when they get old. But on many occasions I have pointed at strangers and asked my wife to shoot me if I become that guy.

Here's a bit of oddness: The day after this cartoon appeared in papers, I received the following email.

"I dont like how you put guns in your comics, espically on Valentines Day - (man's name) for my daughter who is 11"

That was the whole thing. I usually answer all of the mail I get, positive or negative, but this one stumped me. I have no idea what to say to this man and his daughter. I want to ask so many questions.

How about knives, can I show a person chopping onions with a knife?

Are sticks okay?

Is there a day other than Valentine's Day when a cartoon gun would be less offensive?

Have you ever heard of words like "humor," "satire," "hyperbole," "unrealistic desires to control a world which is essentially a festival of random chaos heading downhill without brakes," "choose your battles"?

Speaking of words:1. Some commentators pointed out in yesterday's post that I have confused the meaning of the term "goatee" with "Van Dyck." I have no doubt you are correct, but I lost my facial hair terms chart the last time I moved and so was utilizing common vernacular.

2. A couple of people wrote in the comments section that they had small problems with one aspect or another of my Bizarro iPhone app. All I can say is that mine works fine as does my wife's and a handful of friends I've talked to, but I will mention your comments to the programmers. Bugs in phone apps tend to float around indiscriminately, depending on how good the 3G reception is in your area, how many times you've dropped your phone, and how hemp oil-stained your fingers are when you push the buttons. My exprience with iPhone apps is that all the stuff works most of the time in most apps, and they're either free or a couple of bucks, so I figure it's just the chance you take.

3. I don't have time to post a contest today because I'm out of town this weekend and trying to achieve some deadlines in early. I'm speaking to a Florida group from the Center for Inquiry, which should be fun and certainly a good deal warmer than Brooklyn.

My most heartfelt and lugubrious apologies to both of my faithful blog readers for not posting more often of late. I intend to post six days a week but have been up to my eyeballs in extra work lately.

Here is an offering which I enjoy. I've always liked goatees, even as a kid, which is LONG before they were the ubiquitous mouth frame they are today. I wore one in the early nineties, even though my (first) wife hated it and a friend of mine used to introduce me as "my friend, Satan." In contemporary art, the Devil frequently has a goatee but I have no idea why that started or how far back that goes. I've read that his arrow-tipped tail is actually a watered-down version of an erect penis, which in very early Christendom was the way he was routinely portrayed. Like much about Christian mythology, I'm guessing this image is a throwback to the satyr of Greek mythology. This is mostly conjecture on my part, so don't go use this info on Jeopardy! and blame me if you lose.

A lot of totally bald guys wear goatees, presumably because they want to have some form of hair decoration on their head and lone mustaches have come to be seen as "gay". A full beard on a bald guy is fine, but I'm not sure of the best way to handle the end of the beard, where it meets the bald head above the ears. A sharply trimmed end seems too abrupt and can make the beard look pasted on. A fade-out from beard to bald seems best, but that's got to be very difficult to achieve and maintain.

The musician, Moby, has a head undecorated by hair (except for eyebrows) and not only likes it that way but is a little militant about it. He once criticized bald guys with goatees in a conversation with me, which struck me as odd since I was wearing something similar – my current mustache and "soul patch". I'm not completely bald, so maybe that made him feel it was appropriate. Regardless, that experience was in the back of my mind when I wrote this cartoon.

While I like goatees, I know there are those who don't and will likely get a laugh from this cartoon. Or email it to their friends with goatees, in an effort to get their goat.

Monday, February 15, 2010

So here it is President's Day and Valentine's Day back-to-back. Who can afford all of the presents for both such important holidays, especially in this sluggish economy?!

The solution is to get that special someone (and yourself) a Bizarro iPhone app! Boy, am I excited about it! I've been working for months with some very cool app designers here in NYC and we've come up with a new innovation in the comics-for-phones field!

Previously, with other comics apps, you could only buy a given number of cartoons and cram them into your phone and when you'd seen them all, that was that. Could take you ten minutes, could take you ten years.With the Bizarro app, a NEW COMIC is added EVERY DAY! (The same comic that appears in newspapers.) PLUS, at any given time there is a YEAR'S ARCHIVE of comics that can be accessed super easy and fast from a handy-dandy calendar page. You can also click to access bio info about me (oh! so funny!), info about Bizarro (more humor!), and a help link if pushing buttons on a phone ends up being more than you can handle. Also, you can shoot an email to your other cool friends who might like this app, and you can leave comments. Last, but not least, you canclick to access this very ever-lovin' blog.

ALL FOR ONLY $1.99 PER YEAR! How can we give all of these laughs, drawings, insights, and life-changing experiences away for only $1.99 per year? I'm not sure, I'll have to ask them about raising the price to something more appropriate, like $10K per week. But for now, the price is DEAD CHEAP, so don't miss it!

As you can see from the graphic below, the home page is super long, so scroll down, amigos!

Saturday, February 13, 2010

I never know how many people will be confused by a given cartoon but I'm guessing this one caused its share of puzzlement. What I'm referring to here is the Church of Scientology, which has followers all over the world but is headquartered in Los Angeles, and whose faithful believe something similar to ancient space aliens are living inside them. Yes, it sounds like a strange basis for a "religion," but then it was devised by a science fiction writer, so what do you expect?

I finally saw Bill Maher's film, "Religulous" and although I fully expected to enjoy it, it was far more entertaining and enlightening than I had anticipated. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys the rational examination of human behavior and a good laugh, regardless of their faith or lack of it.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Very exciting, HUGE news about Bizarro to be announced on this blog on Monday! Don't miss it!

I'd tell you now, but you'd just forget it over the weekend with all of your drinking and partying and cruising for sex and household chores and napping and disco dancing and snow shoveling and playing with the dog and gambling and carousing and hiding in the bushes outside your ex's house to see who they're dating and experimenting with new hair color products.

So Monday it is.

In the meanwhile, if you have some time and are into this kind of thing, here is a long interview I did last week for a podcast. Grab your pod and put on your headphones.

For those readers who have not visited a state in which it is legal to carry concealed weapons, this is a sign that you see with some regularity. It is alarming to people like me, who are not used to seeing this kind of thing.

CHNW (my Crazy Half-Nekked Wife) was visiting family in South Dakota recently and we were chatting via cell phone one day while she was out shopping. She read a sign like this one to me as she was entering a store and I offhandedly asked if there was a pile of guns next to the door. Hence, the cartoon.

I don't usually get cartoon ideas from real life situations since most of my cartoons are more surreal than reality. But in this case, not much exaggeration is needed to make this surreal. If I lived in a community in which a lot of people were toting guns, I'd likely be tempted to get a gun to protect myself from all the guns. Seems like a slippery slope.

Without getting too political, if you look around the world at countries where guns are plentiful and unregulated, it is hard to find one you'd even want to visit, much less live in.

RULES, ETC:As usual, two images are posted below, one is the original cartoon, the warped image beneath it has been changed in 15 ways. Your mission, if you are the disco royalty that I think you are, is to find those differences.

1. There are 15 differences between the two cartoons.2.NONE of the differences have to do with the warped nature of the second image.3.ALL of the differences are something missing, added, or moved, not just "bent" from the distortion. The differences will not be too subtle, so once you spot one you should be relatively certain you've found it. (As opposed to something like, "Is the hat on this one is a shade lighter than the other one? Hmmm.")4.FIRST PERSON to correctly list the 15 differencesin the comments section of the post wins 4 packs of Bizarro Trading Cards, mailed by me personally from Bizarro International Headquartersin Brooklyn. I'll even lick the stamp, unless it's self adhesive. SECOND AND THIRD persons with correct answers will each get 2 packs of Bizarro Trading Cards!5.Put your email address on your comment so I can contact you if you win. I won't post it or keep it or file it or sell it or mount a Broadway musical about it.6. If you live outside the U.S., I may not be able to send you a prize. Depends. Canada is probably fine, Saudia Arabia, probably not.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Here's a cartoon that was meant to be a simple bit of wordplay. I threw a bunny with a stick of dynamite onto the computer screen because these are images I toss into my cartoons daily. About this, I did not think twice. Then came the emails.

A notable number of readers thought that the combination of religious names in the word balloon and an explosive device on the computer screen was some sort of statement about terrorism. Or maybe it was just the threatening image of a bunny. While I can see their point, it certainly never crossed my mind until I started getting the emails.

This kind of thing happens all the time. For this reason, long ago I stopped using the dynamite in any cartoon having to do with airline travel. I probably should have foreseen this interpretation, too, but I didn't. As they say here in Brooklyn, whaddyagonnado?

Speaking of headquarters, we're currently in the midst of our first big snowstorm of the season. It won't be anything like the dumping-on of the Washington D.C. area, but it's piling up. Here is a pic from my studio window.

Some of the most surprising mail I get is from readers who take my cartoons to mean something drastically different from what I intended. This cartoon attracted a letter from a liver transplant recipient who thought I was insinuating that most liver transplants are required because the patient was an alcoholic.

This never occurred to me when I was drawing this cartoon, nor at any other time in my life, I was simply making the cliche comic connection between liver damage and excessive drinking.

Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure what the hell this cartoon means. Now that he has a liver he can drink? Could he not drink before he had a liver? But why try to make too much sense of a cartoon about a talking lion and a tin robot anyway?

Even if you're not a football fan, you may enjoy this Superbowl story: CHNW and I were watching the Superbowl last night at our place with a friend. We have one of those DVR cable box things, so I was recording the game while we watched it so we could pause it, rewind, etc., and not risk losing the feed by accidentally changing channels or something. And since we were pausing it now and then, we were about 45 minutes behind the live feed.

In the third quarter it suddenly occurred to me that if the game went into overtime, the recording might run out and we'd miss it, so I'd better also record the show AFTER the game, just to be sure. So I clicked the "guide" button and selected the show right after the game and intended to hit the button that would instruct the DVR to record it. Instead, in a moment of colossal hand-eye coordination error, I hit the button that switches from the recorded show we were watching (the game in the 3rd quarter) to what was playing "live" on the channel at that moment. Which happened to be the very moment that Drew Brees, quarterback for the Saints, was holding up the trophy, confetti streaming down all around him. Of course. Why couldn't it have been another damned Geico commercial?

And thus ended our Superbowl party. I felt like a complete jerk, but was thankful that it wasn't a large Superbowl party, with 30 or 40 attendees with bets riding on the game. I'd likely be typing from a hospital bed right now.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Speaking of wireless, the big news this past week was the Apple iPad. I don't know anything about the product because I don't keep up on these things, but it looks like a giant iPhone that you might find at a novelty store.

Other things I know about the iPad: some say it will revolutionize this or that, others say that it is a piece of crap because it doesn't have a camera.

I bought a little bit of Apple stock a few years ago, so I'm hoping that the "crap" thing isn't true. If all it takes to qualify as a piece of crap is the lack of a camera, 99% of everything I own is crap. In fact, I'm eating crap right now because this banana most certainly does not have a camera.

Here is a funny bit about the iPad from Mad TV that everyone has already seen.

Friday, February 5, 2010

This is one of my favorite gags of late. Tons of cartoons have been done on ventriloquists, I've done quite a few myself, so the fact that I can still amuse myself with this topic is an achievement.

Notice I left any hint of blood out of this cartoon. If it had been web-only, I might have made it a bloody finger and the dummy might even have made mention of the fact that he was experiencing some anal bleeding. But for newspapers, this tasteful version is more appropriate. And maybe funnier, too.

Recently, I wrote a gag with the word "fart" in it and the crudeness of the word is such an integral part of the humor that no other word will do. But "fart" is prohibited in the newspaper comics world, so I'm out of luck. I'll have to save it for the book of adult cartoons I hope to publish one day soon. If I can find a publisher for it.

RULES, ETC:As usual, two images are posted below, one is the original cartoon, the warped image beneath it has been changed in 15 ways. Your mission, if you are the disco royalty that I think you are, is to find those differences.

1. There are 15 differences between the two cartoons.2.NONE of the differences have to do with the warped nature of the second image.3.ALL of the differences are something missing, added, or moved, not just "bent" from the distortion. The differences will not be too subtle, so once you spot one you should be relatively certain you've found it. (As opposed to something like, "Is the hat on this one is a shade lighter than the other one? Hmmm.")4.FIRST PERSON to correctly list the 15 differencesin the comments section of the post wins 4 packs of Bizarro Trading Cards, mailed by me personally from Bizarro International Headquartersin Brooklyn. I'll even lick the stamp, unless it's self adhesive. SECOND AND THIRD persons with correct answers will each get 2 packs of Bizarro Trading Cards!5.Put your email address on your comment so I can contact you if you win. I won't post it or keep it or file it or sell it or mount a Broadway musical about it.6. If you live outside the U.S., I may not be able to send you a prize. Depends. Canada is probably fine, Saudia Arabia, probably not.

Legend has it that one pirate of particularly ruthless reputation had a spell cast on him that made him impervious to death. Many people believe that "Captain Iron Heart" still stalks the world today, spreading terror and misery with unparalleled blood lust.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

To "Worried Fan": thanks for the comment on the last post about being worried about me because I hadn't posted in three days. Very kind of you. Actually, other obligations and activities just sort of got the best of me and I haven't had time, but I'm back now. (cough) Nothing to worry about. (cough, whince)

This is an almost entirely visual gag with the punchline being the sunglasses. The tiny "4" above my signature tells us that I miscounted the symbols in this cartoon and, oddly enough, my editor didn't ask me about it. She's usually very diligent with these things. Normally, I count each time a given symbol appears, so two birds and two "K2"s would count as four, then there's the eyeball and piece of pie on the ground, totaling six. I'm rarely this far off my game, but I may have still been hungover from that wild night of partying with celebrities, drugs, alcohol and orgiastic sex. Oh, wait, I'm thinking of Lindsay Lohan. I probably just spaced out.